Your keys can be a useful weapon - slip thenm between your fingers into a makeshift knuckle duster. Can be very nasty if you have the opportunity to get a good strike in.

Lucky for me my instructor is also a detective and SWAT member. We get to do shooting,knife drills WITH our training.

The tueller drill is REAL, knives are deadly from an agressor at 21ft even if you have a holstered firearm. Create distance and draw on the go. Better have your firearm in condition one too. You don't want to try to be chambering a round when seconds count.

Oh yeah, make sure it's a .45acp.

Never act like prey. Fight like hell and why would you trust a perp who says "do this and I won't hurt you" anyway?

Weapon in the purse... not available... not good.

We did some experimenting in the dojo to see if even for a knife in the pocket, at how many yards a way does an attacker need to be before you have it "fight ready". It is amazing how badly we did for a great variety of styles of knives. Mind you, we train knives and know what we are doing to draw them. We weren't testing technique or style, just the draw to "fight ready".

For myself, I prefer a weapon in my hand that I will always have as available as possible. In the parking lot I have my koubaton on my key ring. It is simple and not fancy, but available which counts for a lot. If you can't get a koubaton, drill a hole through the handle of a screw driver and use that. Carry something. Don't let your wives, daughters, girl friends go into the parking lot without something. And most importantly, TRAIN with it.

I don't disagree in general with this statement, the .45 ACP being the quintessential "manstopper" in hand gun cartridges. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it either. A couple of anecdotes:

1. Capt. W.E. Fairbairn, of Shanghai Police/WWII combatives/Commandos fame, tells the story of a Chinese bandit that continued to charge a police officer who shot him seven times at close quarters with a .45 ACP.

2. One of the guys at my former combat pistol club was a graduate of several courses at Gunsite, back in the Jeff Cooper days. As such, he very much swore by the .45 ACP (Col. Cooper's opinion of the M1911/.45 ACP is well known). He used to josh me about my 9mm being a ".45 set on stun".
On the same day I walked into club practice with my brand new Sig/Sauer P226 in .40 S&W, HE walks in with another brand new P226, but in 9mm. After joshing him a while, I finally asked him why this rather dramatic change of opinion. He said that it was due to his own anecdotal survey of various folks, including paramedics, Navy SEALs, police officers, etc. He said that the conclusion he came to was that the REAL manstopper was the rifle. The hand gun was just a stop gap measure, not as good as a rifle but better than empty hands. As such, shot placement and high capacity (In order to have more chances of getting that one, crucial hit while under the stress of an lethal force encounter), in the opinion of the people he talked to, seemed to be of much greater importance than the power of the hand gun round, which is really marginal at best.

BTW, my personal choice of the .40 S&W is because it struck me as a very nice compromise between power, round capacity and manageable compactness.
Brad "butterfly" Burklund (From these forums) sent me a very long, but very interesting article, a couple of years back by an avid handgunner who'd been a police officer and is currently an autopsy technician. What he had to say in his article tended to bear out my deduction, as he stated that, anecdotally, the three most lethal rounds (Based on the people he saw laid out for autopsy) were the .45 ACP, the .357 magnum and the .40 S&W.

One thing that bothers me about this type of data gathering method is that the rubber knife attacker attacks with 100% because there is 0% chance of actually hurting their victim. The defender only defends with maybe 60% at best because they are only roleplaying and don't want to really hurt the rubber-knife attackers. I don't know how the statistics would change if the defenders actually fought for their lives (not holding back)using well rehersed and effective technique. I would say, however, I wouldn't want to be attacking them with a rubber knife if they were...